We’ve decided to shift focus on this part of our website and move it toward a more interactive community to share our musings and perspectives on life, including lessons-learned and so on about the joys and night-time terrors of writing, publishing and related endeavors.

To get things started, here’s  a link to a New York Times article about the recent Random House -Penguin merger, now officially approved. The  new company will, according to sources, control about a quarter of the trade book market. While that in itself is astonishing — and the first real counterpoint to Amazon to emerge — what struck me even more was this: One goal of the merger, he [Markus Dohle, the chairman and chief executive of Random House] said, is to “crack the code of discoverability” — of how to put books in front of potential buyers — “in a world with fewer bookstores.”  

The fact that the discoverability is at the root of the merger of these two long-standing companies is an extraordinary admission, and illustrative of the fact this conundrum facies every publisher – from the one e-book indie author to the now biggest publishing behemoth in history.

Discoverability. The collective obsession. We’ll talk more about this topic in months to come. And I suspect unlike the gatekeeping approach of author-publisher-bookstore-reader of decades gone by, the DNA of the 21st century code will contain many more variables, none set in stone, with new ways only a clever idea away.

Here’s another post over at Pumpjack on this topic.deeo.ru